Industrial supply dispensing units often include a plurality of internal compartments accessed via doors or drawers, such as dispensing units with multi-tiered, locker-like or cabinet-of-drawers-like configurations. A user may access an internal compartment in order to manually remove a stocked item such as a tool, a part, a consumable, etc., with the removal of that item being detected and tracked for internal auditing purposes or as part of a supplier-managed, on-site stocking service. Removal of the item may be detected by one or more types of sensors including, in the present application, a load cell or scale-like platform measuring device. Tracking of removals and subsequent replenishment may be performed by the controller of the dispensing unit itself or by electronic communications with a remote server and database.
When used for dispensing discrete items, the load cell or scale-like platform measuring device does not need to measure the precise weight of the stocked items, nor any precise difference in measured weight attributable to the removal of an item, but does need to accurately ‘count’ the stocked items by estimating the number of items from a measured property such as strain or rough weight. Gross errors in the measured property can cause a miscount or misestimation of the number of items present, the number of items removed, the number of items remaining, etc., and will tend to create discrepancies in the tracking of removed and replenished stock. For example, an item may partially rest or wedge against a side wall of the internal compartment, and the measured property (typically strain of a load cell) may be altered by friction or mechanical interference between the two that resists free movement of the platform. Thus, it may be useful to provide a bin, supported by or integrated with the platform, to keep stocked items within the confines of the platform. In addition, customers following lean manufacturing methodologies such as 5S (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain) may prefer that the items within a bin be orderly and organized rather than merely piled within. Thus, it may be useful to provide a means for flexibly organizing items within the confines of the platform and bin.
Existing dispensing units generally use platform measuring devices supporting discrete bins, which may themselves shift and partially rest or wedge against a side wall of an internal compartment, or platforms having affixed or integral bins, where changes in the dispensed stock (particularly the size, height, width, or depth of an item) require removal of at least the platform portion of the device in order to alter the bin dimensions and configuration. However, applicants have developed a load cell bin system which may be altered without removal of either the platform or the overall platform measuring device from the dispensing unit, thus simplifying the process of changing bin dimensions and configurations when making changes to the dispensed stock.